What is the ideal board size?

Wednesday, October 07, 2015

Is there an ideal size of a Pinterest board? We often get this question from both beginners and seasoned pinners. Beginners tend to be concerned that their board are too small, while people that have been pinning for a long time tend to think that their boards are overgrown.

So, we decided to analyze a bunch of successful boards and find out whether there is any correlation between the number of pins on board and the number of people that follow the board. Since group boards tend to have a lot more pins that personal boards, we decided to analyze them separately. Let's start with personal boards:
This chart shows the average number of pins found on personal boards with different sizes of audience. The horizontal axis shows the number of followers. As we can see, boards with less than 100,000 followers tend to have around 250-400 pins on average, but the most popular boards usually have twice as many pins.

The next chart focuses on collaborative boards:
As we expected, the average number of pins found on group boards is an order of magnitude higher compared to personal boards. As group boards are becoming more popular, they attract more contributors, so the average number of pins tends to grow, spiking at nearly 35,000 pins for the average board with 75,000 followers.

But the most successful group boards show a different trend. They tend to have fewer contributors, and they often don't allow contributing more than just a few pins per day. So, those boards are considerably smaller (averaging around 12,000 total pins on group boards with 500,000 followers).

I guess, the main takeaway point is that you don't have to worry about splitting your boards until they grow to several hundred pins. And if some of your boards have only a handful of pins, you might want to consider growing or consolidating them. By the way, some of our recent studies reveal that successful pinners tend to have around 80-100 boards, and most of their pins are repinned from other people's boards.